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Your success in the workplace is inextricably linked to your collaborations with other people. You must therefore know who will help and who will hinder your relevancy and sustainability in the workplace. There are four primary types of people (characters) you must always identify:

1. The Leader

The Leader is the one who holds sway in the room. The Leader is not always, and perhaps rarely, the one with the most words. He or she is the one the people respect, and the one who holds the most influence. When the Leader speaks, the majority listens. The others in the room offer support to the real leader through nonverbal cues such as smiling, nodding, direct eye contact, and adjusting their seating position to face the Leader. Oftentimes, when the positional leader (who is not the real leader) is speaking, others in the room are fidgety, they stare at the table or off in the distance, or they carry on nonverbal conversations with coworkers.

I do not suggest here that most positional leaders are not the real leaders. It is my experience, however, that it is best to not assume position equals influence but instead to enter a meeting with a clean slate and make your observations from an unobstructed view. Remember that nearly every great CEO was once a typical employee sitting in meetings with bosses and coworkers. And nearly every great entrepreneur who set out on his own was in the beginning an unpositioned leader with untapped potential. To align yourself with such people is not only a wise strategy, it opens the door to opportunities you could not access on your own. Will not such leaders recruit those closest to them, those they trust, to join in their ventures? It has always been so, and you would do well to position yourself in their camp. The advantages of spotting the Leader in a meeting are fairly obvious. This is the person with whom you ought to align yourself more than any other individual. Not only will you learn from the Leader, you will quicken your experience and you will position yourself to climb as the Leader climbs. I have seen this time and again in my corporate experience. As the Leader moves up, so does the Leader’s inner circle. As the Leader succeeds, so do his closest supporters. Put simply, those aligned with the real leaders in any organization will receive portions of good fortune unavailable to the rest. Some four thousand years ago, ancient Israel’s third monarch, the wise King Solomon, said it this way: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise.” We speak of one being guilty by association, but the opposite is equally true: one is also successful by association.

2. The Loafer

The Loafer is, conversely, one you must avoid. He is the one to whom good fortune remains unseen. To be aligned with him is to blind yourself to various opportunities and stunt your potential. To observe the Loafer in a meeting is straightforward. He is the one who is late, unprepared, and uninterested. While meetings can certainly achieve high levels of boredom, the Loafer takes apathy to a new level, primarily evidenced by a lack of involvement. The Loafer will rarely make his idle stance obvious in the presence of a superior (and therefore rarely in meetings in which one is present), but his nonverbal cues invariably give him away: roaming eyes, slouched posture, lack of note-taking tools, and a static seating position regardless of who is speaking. Concerning the Loafer, the ancient Roman philosopher Horace offered proper advice: “That destructive siren, Sloth, is ever to be avoided.” To identify and then avoid close association with the Loafer is to avoid misfortune. The Loafer lacks the sight to see his own opportunities and therefore can only hinder the sight of yours.